


Two of Something

by scioscribe



Category: BlacKkKlansman (2018)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Period-Typical Racism, Pining, Undercover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-02 16:53:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24170134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Ron's in trouble, and he's pretty sure a rescue's not coming.
Relationships: Ron Stallworth/Flip Zimmerman
Comments: 11
Kudos: 125
Collections: Hurt Comfort Exchange 2020





	Two of Something

**Author's Note:**

  * For [merle_p](https://archiveofourown.org/users/merle_p/gifts).



“There are two reasons why it’s not going to be a problem,” Ron said.

Flip leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “All right. Tell me.”

Two months after that burning cross outside Ron’s building, two months after Ron asking David Duke if he was-uh sure he was talking to a bona fide white man, two months after not shredding half the shit he was supposed to shred, he and Flip were still partners, and Ron liked it that way. He liked it for a lot of reasons, and he could even admit to some of them. But not this one—not the way Flip played that still-waters-run-deep bit so straight that he was like some smooth pond Ron could see his own reflection in. Flip watching him—watching him and looking like he liked what he saw—was something Ron was starting not to be able to live without. He liked to run things by Flip, see how they bounced back at him. Hell, two Ron Stallworths were better than one, weren’t they?

“Number one,” Ron said, “is that we don’t have any news stations out here. No one’s putting my face on television and beaming it out so somebody we’re tracking can look up from his Hungry Man dinner and see me smiling back at him.”

“You know, Jackie Robinson did get better press coverage. Guess you should have been first at something people actually care about.”

“No, because Jackie Robinson doesn’t get to go undercover. The Chief asked _me_ if I wanted to be Jackie, I asked _him_ if I could go undercover.” He held up two fingers. “Second reason’s that none of the guys we go after are the kind who can tell one black guy from another.”

“Yeah, that’s a fair point. You want another fair point? Stop getting your picture in the paper. It’s a good way to get yourself killed no matter what bullshit justifications you come up with.” He pushed one fingertip down flat against the newspaper on his desk, and when it came away, Ron saw the ink smudged across it: part of his name.

It was the third article this month and the first one with a picture. He could see why Flip didn’t like it. Shit, he didn’t like it either, but it was the kind of gamble he was willing to take.

He said, “They just push me out there so they can prove that oh, no, sir, there’s no racial problem on the Colorado Springs police force. Trust me, it’s more a pain in my ass than it is in yours.”

Flip snorted. “That I believe. I don’t think it was your idea to go to—” He spun the paper around on his desk so he could double-check it. “A Junior League dinner dance. Jesus Christ.”

“If they’d just hire another black officer, I could do my job and leave posing for pictures to somebody who actually likes it. But I bet you already know what response I got.”

Flip exhaled. “Budget cuts.”

“Guess it’s a classic for a reason.”

Well, Ron would think later, looking back on all this while he bled out in the back of a bar, you couldn’t say they hadn’t seen it coming.

***

“Give me a good bank robbery any day,” Jimmy said. “You know? A bank robbery is—” He pinched his fingers in the air like he was trying to describe how to season something. “A bank robbery is just so clean. The stakes are so low. I mean, you’re the robber, and what do you want, money? Fuck you, everybody wants money. I’m not sympathetic. But I’m not all irate about it, either. I’m not gonna cry into my sleeve because some pussies in three-piece suits get their insurance rates hiked a little. It’s great. It’s like capture-the-flag. I wish all we ever did was work bank robberies.”

Ron maybe would have agreed a little more wholeheartedly if he hadn’t been standing there in nothing but his boxers and a smile. The problem was that bank robbers were usually professionals, and professionals always checked under the shirt, so they had to be extra-careful—and extra-creative—if they planned to go in bugged.

Flip fished the wire out of its storage box and wound it around his hand. “Leg up on the bench.”

“Which leg?” Ron said.

“Well, it depends. Do you dress left or right?” He raised his eyebrows at Ron’s shorts and then said, “Never mind, I can tell. Left, so—right foot up on the bench.”

“You ever do any nude modeling in college?” Jimmy said, and damn if he wasn’t eating out of a box of Cracker Jacks, licking the residual stickiness off his fingers as he crunched his way down to the prize. “You look like you’re posing for some kind of Greek statue.”

“I’m posing for Flip to tape this damn thing so I can put my jeans back on,” Ron said. “And I still say I could do it myself.”

“You don’t fuck around with placing a wire,” Flip said. “Not with these guys. If you try to do it looking down at yourself like that, you don’t have the right angle, and then you’re fucked—you can’t tell whether someone else looking at you would see it or not.” He brushed the cotton edge of Ron’s shorts up, his long fingers warm and matter-of-fact against Ron’s thigh.

“Try not to read too much into this,” Jimmy said. “It’s not really serious until Flip buys you an engagement ring.”

“How about you shut up and let me concentrate on what I’m doing?” Flip said. The sticky tape followed, clinging against the crease of Ron’s thigh, right up against his balls.

Ron figured this would be a great time to think about literally anything but Flip’s hands almost right on his dick, anything but the still look of absolute attention Flip was giving him. You know what he needed to do when he got home? He needed to clean out the toaster. Little bread crumbs had been staying down in the bottom of the slots, and now he couldn’t even make breakfast in the morning without it smelling like his kitchen was going to burn down.

Flip leaned back. “Okay, roll them down and flash me for a second so I can see if anything’s hanging down. Well, anything that’s not supposed to be.”

“Seriously?”

“Relax, you can tape mine on after we’re done with yours. The only person getting a free show here is Jimmy.”

Jimmy rattled the box of Cracker Jacks. “And I hit up the snack bar for it.”

Ron sighed and turned his head, looking at the row of gunmetal-gray lockers as he lowered his boxers and let Flip get a good look at his dick, which was at least looking like it wasn’t going to give him too much trouble. “Satisfied?”

“So happy I could sing,” Flip said, straight-faced. He stripped off his jeans and then, with a shrug, his own boxers. “I’ve done this before. I’m not shy about it.”

“He knows he’s hung,” Jimmy said.

“And after seeing Ron here, I know I don’t have to worry about making him feel bad about what he’s got to offer. We’re equals.” Flip had that look he got sometimes, like he wasn’t actually smiling but he would’ve if he didn’t spent his whole life undercover, running every twitch through double- and triple-checks to see if they fit him. He drew a stripe across his exposed thigh. “Here. Around there, anyway. As long as you can’t see it without crouching down, it ought to be good.”

“Unless you’re getting checked for a wire by someone who’s going to blow you.”

“Jimmy, I’m glad you’re here for the color commentary. Anyway, can we get on with it, please? I’m freezing my ass off here.”

“Right,” Ron said. He grabbed the surgical tape they were using and got to work. That was the stuff that was supposed to stand up to sweat and a typical range of movement, so hypothetically he and Flip wouldn’t get halfway through the meetup and then have wires running down their legs like piss.

Flip was cut, which Ron hadn’t seen up close before and which he couldn’t really appreciate now, not even with him bending low over Flip’s crotch to tape the write in place. He could smell the light musk coming off Flip’s skin. He found a good path for the wire and stood up, looking it over now not as something that got him hot but something that could get Flip killed if he’d fucked it up. A little more critical of an eye than he’d ever cast on any good dick before, let alone one he’d already spent some time thinking about. But he’d done all right.

“You’re good,” he said.

Flip nodded and tugged his jeans back on. “Okay. So we run through it again. Who are you?”

“Someone who’s made it this long by not giving out his name to anybody who asks, but you can call me Rich.”

“Why Rich?”

“Because that’s what all this is going to make me,” Ron said, with a kind of a hard, glittering smile he was borrowing from Roundtree.

“Kind of cheesy,” Jimmy said, and that was an actual critique, not just more enjoyment from the peanut gallery. Ron could tell the difference even though Jimmy’s cheeks were still so stuffed full of Cracker Jacks he looked like a chipmunk.

But Flip overruled him: “It’ll play well.” He turned back to Ron. “You done any time, Rich?”

“Sure. But not since I’ve been a for-real working man, since I got myself a legit specialty. I spent some time doing smash-and-grabs, back when I was first getting started, and they got me for that, gave me sixteen months in Englewood. But that was before I knew what I was doing. Now I know.”

“Good. Keep it simple. Odds are you’ll have a ten minute interview, in and out—this guy Pitts has been knocking around for years, and he didn’t last that long by bringing guys he doesn’t know in on something as big as a bank. But this’ll get your name out there. The longer people have heard of Rich, the better they’ll feel about him.”

Ron liked getting to think long-term. He said, “Do I get to quiz you too?”

Flip shrugged. “Can if you want.”

It wasn’t really the same: Flip had had years to build up the name with all the town’s under-the-table movers and shakers. He wore this particular act easily, like a pair of beat-up old jeans. He didn’t need Ron to test him on his cover, but Ron liked the idea of doing it anyhow; he liked bringing them up even with each other, getting them back up close.

“Name?”

“Jake Cowen. I’m not trying to be mysterious like that prick Rich over there.” He jerked his chin at Ron like he was pointing him out to somebody else, and then his expression shifted—Jake to Flip—and he added, “These guys all know me anyway. Good old Jake’s practically a fixture at their poker games. He loses, by the way.”

“Everybody likes a good loser. Where’re you from?”

“Place called Silverton.”

“What’s in Silverton?”

“Nothing, that’s why I’m here.”

“Favorite spot around town?”

“Except for the poker game, I’m not a big nightlife guy, but my brother-in-law likes to drag me out to that pool hall on Fourth. I guess they have good wings.”

“And some kind of off-brand chalk that’s the wrong shade of blue,” Ron said. “I’ve been there. You can throw that in; it’s a nice touch.”

“Jesus, don’t egg each other on,” Jimmy said. “We’re gonna end up with two of one of you all over again. It’s a job interview, and only one of you’s gonna get hired. Play it low-key, get us some intel, and save any big monologues for community theater. Which one of you’s going in first?”

“Me,” Ron said, snagging the role before Flip could.

“Fine. I’ll be listening in. You’ve got half an hour, max, and then Flip will put in an appearance.” He shrugged. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t even push you right now. He’s not gonna hire you, and coming on too strong only makes you look suspicious. But the Chief wants us to throw our all at this one, and he’ll be listening in, so do what you can. When it comes to this Pitts guy, he’s got a hard-on that could cut glass.”

Pitts was bad news, no question about it, but Ron still got a sour-milk kind of taste in his mouth thinking about how much effort they had to pour into him. The Chief had had them drop the KKK the _second_ anybody had known they’d even looked at it, like the good white people of Colorado Springs wouldn’t like knowing their tax dollars were going towards saving black people some grief. Now, Howie Pitts, a bank robber and run-of-the-mill knee smasher: he was another story. Like Jimmy said, going after him was just so damn clean. Spotless as a white sheet, even. Everybody could walk away happy.

But fuck it. That case, _his_ case, had been dead for months now. Whether he liked it or not, Pitts was his present, and this was the job.

And bullshit aside, Ron did love the job. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Which meant that what the Chief wanted, the Chief got.

He adjusted the lapels on his jacket. “How do I look?”

Flip didn’t answer him, just Jimmy. “Fine. You dress too good to be a cop anyway. Look at Flip—motherfucker owns five plaid shirts and two pairs of jeans.”

“Three,” Flip said.

“It’s so bad even he doesn’t look like a cop, just some sort of off-duty lumberjack. You, though—” Jimmy pursed his lips. “You’ve got an actual look. And it doesn’t say cop. Or at least it doesn’t say white cop, which is the only kind people are used to spotting.”

Flip finished lacing his boots up again. His gaze flitted across Ron. “Yeah. You look good.”

***

Howie Pitts held his mob boss office hours in the back of a dive bar that, so far as Ron could tell, served nothing but whiskey, beer, and dirty looks. It was only willing to give him the last, but he didn’t let it faze him.

He settled down in a scratched-up wooden booth and laid his arm across the back of the seat. Casual. That was the kind of man Rich was.

But Pitts gestured him up again. “You know the drill. If you don’t, I got no interest in teaching you, so you can turn around right now.”

“I know the drill,” Ron said. He stood back up and lifted his shirt up high, turning around. “See? I even knew not to tuck it in, just for you.”

“I like a man who plans ahead.” He sipped his whiskey and didn’t offer to order Ron a drink. “Skeet vouched for you, but he didn’t tell me your name.”

Skeet was their snitch, a guy trying to cut down his wife’s burglary sentence. He’d heard about Pitts shopping around for talent, and he’d brought them the news like a dog with a bone. He was Ron’s in; “Jake Cowen” hadn’t needed one.

“Skeet didn’t mention my name because I never gave it to him,” Ron said. “Not the real one, anyway. I just go by Rich.” He unveiled the line about why, and Flip was right: weak a joke as it was, it played well. It even got Pitts to laugh, and he didn’t look like he did that very often.

He wasn’t sure he liked the look in Pitts’s eyes, though. They were a flat gray, hard as steel but without its shine.

They didn’t get into any specifics about the job. Pitts kept it vague right up until the end—vague enough that Ron was pretty sure that, laugh or no laugh, the opportunity was going to slip away from him. A foregone conclusion, just like Jimmy had said. The gunmetal look Pitts had had never really gone away.

But then Pitts said, “All right. I like you, Rich. You seem like a standup guy. Go ahead into the back room and one of my guys will fill you in.” He looked past Ron to the bar’s front door. “I got somebody else to talk to.” He added, casually, “That’s Jake. You know him?”

Ron turned around and saw—no surprise there—Flip silhouetted in the doorway, long and lean, with the sun just behind him so he threw a huge shadow across the floor.

They’d agreed to play it by ear on whether or not they—Rich and Jake—had met before, and now something—maybe just those lightless eyes—made him say, “Doesn’t look familiar.”

They could have vouched for each other, especially since Ron had just been hired, but he turned the chance down instead.

Nothing in Pitts’s expression changed. “Guess I’ll get to know him myself, then. Good to meet you, Rich. You can go straight out the back door once my guy’s laid the plans on you.”

Why the back door? Pitts didn’t want the world to see a black man strolling out of his shitty little dive?

Ron didn’t like it, but it wasn’t enough of a reason to blow the job. He just nodded and headed deeper into the bar, down a hallway with a sticky, peeling linoleum floor.

Pitts’s back room was lined with extra stock, which was normal enough. It smelled like bleach and damp cardboard and old beer, which wasn’t too strange either. But he didn’t like the way the space was all cleared out in the middle—no table, no extra cases of booze. Just a rusty-looking drain set in the middle of a concrete floor.

He had maybe a second to look more closely at that drain and know just how fucked he was before a big, meaty hand closed around his throat. It pushed him back against the shelves, making them shake.

The hand belonged to a giant white man Ron already knew was named Gus Blewett. As in, Skeet had said, he could have been a big-time wrestler but he blew it. He was made out of nothing but bulky slabs of muscle—and if he’d gone to seed a little since he’d washed out of the wrestling circuit, but he was still a mountain. He still had the grip strength to choke a moose, and he had his hand clenched so tight that Ron couldn’t make a sound. He could barely even breathe. It felt like only a thread of air was getting in and out of him.

This human mountain fumbled at Ron’s shirt, swiping his hand up underneath it—front, back, and sides. When he found nothing, he did what Flip and Jimmy had said he might and tugged at Ron’s belt. His fingers were so thick that he had trouble getting it undone, and he finally peeled Ron’s jeans down his legs with them still buttoned and half fastened by the belt. It was like being skinned.

Ron closed his eyes. The goddamn wire was right there, some of it maybe even poking out around the hem of his shorts. The transistor was shoved up by his balls. It couldn’t be that hard to see.

_Do you dress left or right?_

Flip had said the whole point of the crotch mike was that searches tended to miss it.

 _They don’t like looking for it,_ Flip had said. _Not there. So unless they get extra-friendly, they don’t see it._

 _Don’t see it,_ Ron thought. _Come on. Don’t tell me you’re the friendly type._

He didn’t see it, or at least Ron didn’t think he did. He let Ron go.

He gasped, trying to force as much air as possible through a windpipe that felt like it was half-crushed. He needed somebody—needed backup—but Jimmy would have already switched frequencies, would have already changed over to just recording Ron instead of listening to him. He’d be listening to Flip.

“Flip,” he said hoarsely. He didn’t know why. There was no way Flip could hear him from here, especially not with his voice crushed down to something weaker than a mouse squeak. Maybe he wanted to warn him, maybe he wanted to ask for his help, but either way, he couldn’t.

Maybe just because by then he’d seen the knife in Blewett’s hand, and he was a sentimental asshole who just thought it’d be nice if the last thing he said was Flip’s name.

Whatever it was, Blewett didn’t seem interested in giving him the time to figure it out. He slammed the knife into Ron with so much force that the handle broke off it, leaving nothing but the shiny flat end of the blade bobbing in and out with Ron’s chest as he tried to breathe around it. He tried to say something—never mind that last words idea, he wasn’t ready to stop talking yet—but he couldn’t get anything out. Between the bruises on his throat and the knife in his chest, he had nothing left but blood. It was soaking through his shirt. He was choking on it.

Blewett put his hand on the flat of the knife, like he was considering trying to tug it out, but when he couldn’t get enough purchase on it, he shrugged his boulder-like shoulders philosophically and gave up.

“It’s gotta be quiet,” he said. “So it won’t get in the way of the real business outside. Otherwise I’d have just put a bullet between your eyes, and it would have been faster. It’s nothing personal, you going slow. It’s just ’cause of the noise.”

Ron spat blood at him, but it didn’t land on anything but Blewett’s shoes, and he looked like a guy who’d gotten blood on his shoes so many times he didn’t even notice it anymore. He just sat back on his heels and watched as Ron fought for air.

He said, “Like I said, nothing personal. It’s just that we know who you are. First black cop in the city.” He tossed the handle of the knife away. “Guess they’ll have to get another one now.”

“Guess again, asshole.”

Flip was suddenly there, filling up the doorway to the back room. He had his gun pointed straight at Blewett, but his hands were vibrating a little, making it jump around and blur in Ron’s vision.

“Jake?” Blewett said. He sounded genuinely confused, like he couldn’t decide why a sort-of buddy would turn on him like this.

“Police,” Flip said. “Hands in the fucking air. _Jimmy!_ Jimmy, goddammit—”

Jimmy followed him in, looking out-of-breath, and said, “Ah, fuck,” the second he saw Ron on the ground. “I’ll get an ambulance out here.”

“Get him first,” Flip said, jerking his head in Blewett’s direction. “Put some cuffs on him so I don’t have to waste my time standing here. The Chief still think there’s no fucking problem?”

He had his gun holstered in the same second that the cuffs closed around Blewett’s wrists, and then he was kneeling down in front of Ron, one hand against Ron’s bloodied shirt.

“You’ll be fine,” Flip said. His voice wasn’t too steady. “The good thing about this asshole not knowing how to use a knife is he couldn’t pull it out again. I know it’s got to hurt like hell, but it’s stopping too much blood from coming out. You’re going to be okay.” His other hand closed around Ron’s, and he squeezed it and rubbed it like he was trying to warm him up. “Hey, your day sure went downhill since I almost had my hand around your dick, huh? If I’d known where all this was going, I’d have thrown in a handjob.” He was talking too fast—Flip, who never let a damn thing show on his face unless he wanted it to, was tripping over his words and looking like an open book. One Ron knew how to read, unless he was even more out of it than he felt.

He weakly squeezed Flip’s fingers back.

“Yeah. There you go.” He let go only to ease Ron’s jeans back up over his hips, and then he put his hand against Ron’s cheek. “Years I’ve had this job and I didn’t fuck up an investigation until you. Didn’t blow shit just because of a hunch. And now you come along and look at me the way I look at you—and you—” His mouth snapped shut as the paramedics poured in, and then he was the same old Flip again, smooth-faced and calm even with blood all over him.

It was a reassuring enough sight that Ron let himself close his eyes again. Everything faded out.

***

He didn’t find out the full story until later.

Flip and Jimmy hadn’t liked what they could hear of Pitts’s conversation. He was pretty friendly on a run-of-the-mill day, and hearing the frost in his voice set off some alarms. They’d radioed the Chief, parked two blocks down, to get permission to haul Ron out of there. Jimmy could storm in and slap “Rich” with a phony arrest—sure, it would blow whatever sliver of a chance he had of getting the bank job, but it would keep his cover intact. Give it a boost, even.

But the Chief had said no, told them to keep going. If Pitts got spooked by the cops sniffing around his place, if he bailed on the bank robbery, it could be years before they had him dead-to-rights on anything this good. If Pitts didn’t want to trust Ron, fuck it: Flip was a shoo-in anyway.

Ron’s presence in the bar was just the Chief doubling down on a good thing—and he’d rather fold a losing hand than forfeit the whole pot. They were ordered to assume Ron was fine. Ron would have even agreed with that. There hadn't been too much reason to think anything was going sideways.

But Flip hadn’t liked it, hadn’t liked any of it. He’d come in early in the hope of ushering Ron out without attracting any attention, but Pitts screwed that up by sending Ron to the back room. Flip hadn’t liked seeing him head back there, and he liked it even less when he couldn’t get Pitts to cough up what it was all about.

And when he decided whatever was happening in that back room was taking too long, Flip went to find out what was happening to him.

They didn’t get Pitts. Blewett clammed up and wouldn’t admit to shish-kabobbing Ron on anyone’s say-so but his own, wouldn’t roll on his boss at all. Jake Cowen had gone up in a puff of smoke, along with the years of work that had gone into establishing him.

Ron, stuck in a hospital bed, was still glad Flip had done it. But he could see why the Chief wasn't over the moon that saving his pain-in-the-ass black officer had had to cost him his crook white whale. Still, he'd given Ron all the paid sick leave, and he'd sent flowers.

Jimmy was the one who told him most of this, and Jimmy was the one who got him out of the hospital, too, wheeling him out to his car with the peeling paint—man had no taste at all—and loading him in. The upholstery on his seats smelled like a bunch of gym towels all stacked on top of each other.

Jimmy said, “You know, I can’t decide if you’re lucky or unlucky that Blewett missed that wire.”

“Lucky,” Ron said. His voice was still raspy. But he had a lot to say, because of everything he’d had to think over in his hospital bed, this was the one thing he could talk about. “They already knew I was a cop. I’m a bona fide local celebrity. They were figuring I was wired—that’s why Pitts was playing it so cool, not saying anything that could fuck him over; why he laid that groundwork about me going out the back, getting it on the record that he didn’t expect to see me again, that as far as he knew, I just went out the other way. It’s why he made sure Blewett didn’t use a gun. They were always going to kill me, wire or no wire. Not finding it just meant Blewett started getting sloppy.”

“What, you figure it messed up his aim?”

Ron shook his head. He was exhausted and strung-out on painkillers and he needed to see Flip, needed to get things between them figured out.

“Sloppy like chatty. He stopped caring what he said or how long it took me to die, just as long as I didn’t make too much noise. If he’d found the wire, he would have just cut my throat. Not much noise in that that you’d pick up on a groin mic.”

“Jesus. So much for my low stakes bank robbery.”

“Where’s Flip?” He’d meant to keep that question to himself, but he guessed he could blame the loose lips on the painkillers. “I haven’t seen him since it happened.”

“He was around a lot before you woke up.”

“And then, what? He got busy?”

“Fucking doubtful. He’s suspended. Not so much for saving your life, before you ask, but more for losing his shit at the Chief and shooting his mouth off about how you’d both fucking said you wanted your picture to stop showing up in the paper. Guess they might break the piggy bank to get another black officer after all—and you know how it is, then nobody gets any coverage. Nobody gives a shit about there being two of something.” He flicked on his turn signal, swinging a wide left onto Ron’s street. It was raining, and the gray light through the windshield was casting wavy shadows on him, making him look older than ever. “You know, the last minute or so of your tape sort of got lost in all this. Guess I accidentally recorded over it, if you know what I’m saying.”

He didn’t.

Jimmy said carefully, “It could’ve been bad for Flip, you know, if that had gotten out.”

“He’s suspended. Sounds like it was bad enough already.”

“Yeah, well, it could have been worse. For both of you.”

He thought about Flip saying, _You look at me the way I look at you_. Yeah, maybe he knew what Jimmy was saying after all.

“If you talk to him,” Ron said, “could you tell him to come by sometime? He’s not picking up when I call.”

“It’s a bad idea,” Jimmy said. He sighed. “Then again, you’re the guy who gave his real name to the KKK, so bad ideas are right in your wheelhouse. Yeah. I’ll tell him.”

***

Ron hobbled around his apartment all the next day. His legs were fine, but straightening up was hard, and it tugged at the stitches and sore muscles in his chest. He didn’t mind that as much as he did the strangled sound his breath made going in and out. He was trying to ease up off the painkillers—he didn’t like how they made his thoughts slow down to a crawl—so he was hurting more than usual and pissed about it.

Flip turned up around noon. He was wearing plaid shirt number three, which wasn’t even one of Ron’s favorites.

“Hey,” Flip said.

“Hey.” He braced his hand against the wall to make his hunched-over way back to the couch.

Flip said, “Here,” and put his arm around Ron’s waist, keeping his balance for him. He smelled like soap, white boy Irish Spring that was halfway between clover and cleaning spray. Ron had never liked that smell anywhere else, but he liked it on Flip.

He’d meant to be a little mad at Flip for the vanishing act—and the pain had kept him in a mood where being angry was a hell of a lot easier than being happy—but now he wasn’t. He was just annoyed at liking the smell of Irish Spring.

Flip lowered him down onto the couch and then sat down next to him, the two of them looking at their reflections in the blank TV screen.

“I always meant to ask you something,” Ron said.

“Shoot.”

“When I gave my real name to those KKK assholes and you agreed to go be me anytime their Ron Stallworth needed to show up in person, did you ever think of just kicking me off the phone?”

He’d been ready to argue his case back then, if Flip had tried it, but he’d known he’d probably lose: it was Flip, after all, who’d wind up taking the bullet if they didn’t keep their two-man stories straight. Flip had seniority, too, and that meant a lot with cops. Besides, if Flip had handled the phones along with the meetings, there wouldn’t be any more of those moments where they had to cover up the difference between their voices with some line about allergies. It would have been simpler. Safer too.

Flip didn’t hesitate. “I thought about it. A lot, at the beginning, if you want to know the truth. But fuck it, in the end it was your case, rookie or not. I should cockblock you from getting off on putting those guys away? Besides, you’re good on the phone. I’m not—if I can’t see somebody’s face, I can’t read them well enough to put on the right act. I needed you.”

Ron breathed in. Irish Spring and the hurt of making his windpipe work again. He felt like this was worth it, though.

Flip added, “You know, your voice sounds like shit right now. You probably shouldn’t be talking.” He sounded hopeful, like if they could go the rest of their lives without talking about it, he’d die a happy man.

“You blew up your cover.”

Flip sighed. “Yeah.”

“And not because you needed me right then, because you didn’t, and not because it was my case, because it wasn’t. Seems to me that’s you taking a big hit—an even bigger one than with Felix and those assholes—and this time you didn’t even have a good reason for it.”

“The Chief was sticking his head in the sand. He made a bad call telling me not to pull you, he made a bad call _suspending_ me, and he made a bad call plastering your face all over every fucking newspaper to prove how fair-minded he is.”

He’d agree with all that, but it wasn’t anything he didn’t already know. And it wasn’t enough to explain why Flip had thrown away years of work—why he’d risked the job they both knew neither of them wanted to do without—on what had been basically a hunch.

_You look at me the way I look at you._

“Yeah,” Ron said—hopeful, yearning. “Sure. But why’d you do it?”

Flip turned his head, just barely, and scowled at him. “You’re a better actor than a lot of cops who want to pull a stint undercover,” he said, sounding almost neutral, almost like his usual everyday self. “You might even already be better than me. But sounding naïve isn’t your strong suit. You know why I did it. It’s the same reason Jimmy had to edit the tape, and he already told me you knew about that.” He shrugged, stiff-shouldered. “Just ignore it if you want.”

Jimmy had told them not to egg each other on, but that was what they were good at, that was how they did their best work. They knew each other. _Got_ each other. Anything they did together, bad idea or not, was sudden and hot as a lightning bolt.

“I don’t want to ignore it,” Ron said. “You were right, you know.”

“Was I.”

Ron nodded. “I look at you all the time. Watch how you watch me.”

Flip hesitated, motionless and quiet for what felt like an eternity, and then he said, “Okay.” He put his hand on Ron’s leg.

Ron was just wearing drawstring pajama pants, cheap and thin cotton, and Flip’s hand was heavy and hot against them. One finger was close to where he’d laid the wire before, tracing a line across Ron’s thigh. Either thing suited them, Ron decided—the work, this, whatever they’d get up to after, once he was healed up. Any kind of touch. They looked good on each other.


End file.
